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A growing concern today involves the role of pornography as the next generation’s instructor in human sexuality.
For many young people, pornography has become the only guide to sexuality they have ever known. For Catholic parents, this raises the critical challenge of how best to approach these matters with their children, given that kids as young as eight or nine may already be acquiring information and viewpoints about human sexual behaviors from internet pornography.
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When I arrived in Kraków for the 2016 World Youth Day, I was pretty exhausted, having left Los Angeles some 15 hours earlier and having had to change planes in Munich.
But I was enthused as I approached my first appointment right in the heart of the Old City. Through the good ministrations of George Weigel, the world’s leading expert on John Paul II, I was one of a group of bishops and priests invited to spend time with the original youth group of Fr. Karol Wojtyła.
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Q My siblings and I are working together to help my father who is in his 80s and living in the family home.
We have decided to do as much as we can to help him live out his years in the home he loves. The issue is that we are now four months into this and we are having some major disagreements about what it means to support him.
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At the prompting of some of my younger colleagues at Word on Fire, I spent time during a recent vacation getting caught up on the History Channel show Vikings.
My friends had told me that Vikings, curiously, is the most religious show on television. They were right.
Don’t get me wrong. There is enough violence, pillaging, plundering, sword-fighting, and political intrigue to satisfy the most macho viewers; but Vikings is also drenched with religion — and for that I applaud Michael Hirst, its sole writer and director.
The face of my four-year-old scrunched up as he sounded out a word in a book. “Gah,” he said, successfully figuring out the sound of the letter “G.”
He considered the next letter, “O,” thought a moment, then said, “Ahh.”
Finally he got to the last letter, “D,” and put the sounds together. “Gah-ahh-dd,” he said slowly, enunciating each letter individually, his eyebrows knit in concentration.
“Gahd.”
Suddenly, his eyes flew open, his eyebrows shot up, and the light of understanding emanated from his joyous grin as he shouted out, “God! It says God!”
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I would like to continue reflecting on Fleming Rutledge’s extraordinary book The Crucifixion, which I consider one of the most insightful theological books of the decade.
In a previous article, I drew attention to Rutledge’s bracing insistence on the awfulness and shame of the crucifixion. In the ancient world, there was no punishment more painful, terrifying, and de-humanizing than the cross.
It is not simply that Jesus died or even that he was put to death by corrupt people; it was that he endured the death reserved only for the lowest and most despised.
In the light of the resurrection, the first Christians looked back on this horrific event and saw in it something commensurate with the weight of sin. Somehow, on that instrument of torture and humiliation, the Son of God was addressing what could not be adequately addressed in any other way; he was paying the requisite price.
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| Veronica Arntz |
Marriage and family are clearly under attack in many forms in our secular society.
Thus, as Catholics, we must clearly understand the Church’s teaching on marriage and family.
Yet, even in the Church, there is disagreement surrounding marriage and family (including how to help the divorced and remarried), especially since the publication of Pope Francis’s post-synodal apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia.
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In the famous story of David and Goliath, Goliath boasts to the young David that after he kills him, he will give his flesh “to the birds of the sky and beasts of the field.” He conveys his profound disdain for David by speaking this way, deprecating even his corpse.
This offends our sensibility that dead bodies should not be desecrated, but should instead be respectfully buried. Proper disposition and care of another’s body also manifests our Christian faith in the resurrection of that body on the Last Day.
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Fleming Rutledge’s The Crucifixion is one of the most stimulating and thought-provoking books of theology that I have read in the past 10 years.
Both an academic and a well-regarded preacher in the Episcopal tradition, Rutledge has an extraordinary knack of cutting to the heart of the matter. Her book on the central reality of the Christian faith is supremely illuminating, a delight for the inquiring mind — and man, will it ever preach.
During a recent family reunion, my elderly mother and I were the only ones at the table without smartphones. We felt left out.
A few days later I read that Pope Francis advised parents to ban mobile devices from the dinner table to help restore the quality of family relationships.
These two occurrences reminded me of the life of our foundress, St. Jeanne Jugan.
